`Maintainer' field

[Colin Watson]

On Tue, Sep 06, 2005 at 12:48:18PM -0700, Daniel Robitaille wrote:
> On Tue, 2005-06-09 at 19:05 +0100, Ian Jackson wrote:
> > There is no straightforward way find out who the best person is to
> > contact about any particular package, and to get in touch with them.
> 
> I thought that decentralized approach of no package "ownership" was done
> by design by the Ubuntu staff?  While I don't actually develop for
> Ubuntu, from the outside it seems a logical approach considering the
> very small group that deal with the many packages in the distro. 

It's true that we don't have a Big Maintainer Lock on packages by
design, so that we don't run into quite so much trouble when people go
on holiday or whatever. On the other hand, having a list of people who
know stuff about packages (think "expert" rather than "maintainer" if
you like) is extraordinarily useful when you've run into a problem while
working on a package and need some help.

We should be careful to distinguish the two roles of "gateway to
uploads" and "expert".

> > The best available approaches are, it seems, to read the
> > debian/changelog to try to spot frequent contributors and to witter on
> > IRC (guess the channel!) and hope someone notices.
> 
> #ubuntu-devel seems the best one :)   Personally I find that you
> discover pretty quickly who is doing what in the developers crowd simply
> by looking at the changelogs, emails, and IRC chatter.

All the same, I think a bit more organisation might not go amiss.

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson at ubuntu.com]